The Merchant Marine

War's forgotten heroes

Even though it's not formally celebrated until Monday, Sunday is National Maritime Day.

It has become the most ignored national day, memorializing the country's most forgotten historical event and honoring the most ignored element of its military structure, the U.S. merchant marine.

Congress adopted the resolution creating the day on May 20, 1933, taking note of May 22, 1819, the day the steamer Savannah sailed from its home port on the first successful transoceanic voyage by steamship. President Franklin Roosevelt issued the proclamation.

Every succeeding president proclaimed it, and every succeeding generation ignored it.

It was easy to remember winning World War II but easy to forget the merchant marine, the logistical miracle that enabled the victory.

The merchant marine story is all about lessons learned on the cruel seas, of scandalous political treatment of its sailors after the war, of long-fought battles for recognition as veterans, and of a commitment as deep, and a risk at least as high, as any soldier's on any battlefield.

But the merchant marine was invisible.

It had scant public-relations apparatus and no mass grass-roots support. The 13 million men and women of the Army, Navy, Marines and Coast Guard had professional cheerleaders in Washington and war correspondents embedded with them in the field, along with 20-odd-million voting parents.

The 250,000 merchant mariners--1.9 percent as many--had only their parents.

Lacking practical ships

In the beginning, it didn't even have practical ships.

The U.S. Maritime Commission's C2 design of 1938-39 was 459 feet long, 63 feet abeam, 25 feet of draft, 6,000 to 8,000 tons, turbo-electric and steamed along at a maximum 15.5 knots.

They took time to build and, when war arrived, the luxury of time did not exist.

Only 173 were launched in six years through 1945, an average of fewer than 30 a year. It quickly became evident when the U-boat blitz began that that many ships could be sunk in a matter of weeks. Moreover, engine room crews had to be trained to operate the C2's sophisticated machinery, a sharp departure from the oil-fired reciprocal steam engines of the era.

The solution was to adopt the design of a virtual relic, an old British tramp steamer of the Sunderland class, being built in American shipyards for the king's merchant marine navy.

Simple to build, reliable, capacious, but slow. They called it the Liberty ship. Those who love it believe it won the war.

Liberty ships were slow: 10 knots, maybe 11 with a following sea and following wind. But their old-fashioned engines were easy to run and maintain.

Liberty hulls, built in sections and welded together, could be turned out with astonishing speed: 70 days was an average, but the record was two days.

We joked that they were built by the mile and chopped off by the yard.

Shipyards on all three coasts cranked them out--2,751 from September 1940 through the end of the war, the greatest number of oceangoing vessels built to a single design in all history.

The basic design was flexible enough so that the hull could become a tanker, a troop ship, a hospital ship, a break-bulk freighter--even a seagoing machine shop rigged to repair damaged airplanes.

As Roosevelt's "Bridge of Ships" sending aid from the New World to the Old began to slide down the ways, vessels of the growing merchant marine fleet were rushed into convoys carrying lend-lease war cargoes to embattled Britain. These included ships of many nations, including American-owned ships under foreign flags, especially Panamanian.

German subs zeroed in on the bridge, picking off Panama-registered U.S.-owned ships headed for Britain. In the spring of 1941, a U-boat in the south Atlantic stopped a U.S.-flag freighter, the Robin Moor. One item of its cargo, railroad rails on deck, was deemed contraband, and the ship was sunk with gunfire. The crew and passengers had 20 minutes to abandon ship.

This stiffened the spines of foot-draggers in Congress and slightly accelerated the pace of bona fide American preparations for war.

Immediately after the Pearl Harbor attack, German Adm. Karl Doenitz, commander of the submarine force, sent six U-boats to the Atlantic off the American coast, launching a campaign of terror on U.S. shipping that, in Winston Churchill's words, "almost brought us to the disaster of an indefinite prolongation of the war." Before Pearl Harbor, Congress, chary of violating neutrality laws, had been reluctant to arm merchant marine ships, but now the die had been cast.

The navy began arming ships and training gun crews at its capacity of 100 crews a month. Merchant marine officer cadets and seaman trainees were already receiving such training, and all hands performed well and in general effectively.

Early on, though, the arming was sporadic.

The toll exacted by German subs and bombers underscored the urgency of the need to build ships faster than they were being sunk, however, and with the new vessels properly armed, the tide began to turn.